Appetite for deconstruction?

The comedor that I've been eating at here in San Ignacio was open again
tonight--it must be getting to be close enough to the weekend that all
the rich Santa Cruz kids are coming out for vacay, because the place had
more people than I had seen there before. Half-drunk guys drinking bad
Bolivian beer and shouting at the girls as they walk by, and a visibly
dirty Bolivian hippie rolling cigarettes (what kind, I can only guess)
at his table.

While a couple of burros pulling a cart of firewood walked by, turned
the corner, and headed around the plaza and motorbikes with two or three
people riding whined by, some dude in curly hair got up, put a couple of
Bolivian pesos in the jukebox and started playing "Sweet Child 'o Mine."

And I'm back, a couple thousand miles away and about fifteen years ago,
thinking about high school, boy scouts, strip malls and rusty domestic
automobiles in the half-hick part of Connecticut (which sounds like a
contradiction until you've been to my hometown and seen the guys that
are still wearing mullets and acid wash jeans).

Thinking about climbing Mount Washington with my boy scout troop, with
John Murphy (who is now in Iraq) repeatedly shouting "we're all going to
die!" then laughing wildly; Driving home from school in a rusty '87
Chevy station wagon with a dent on the roof where we'd sat up there too
many times, filled with me and seven others, two trumpets, a baritone
sax and a tuba (Danny K. is still playing, and that tuba is probably
still playing, too); Eating an apparently endless flow of Taco Bell
chile-cheese burritos and only leaving the place when the floor was
covered in broken sporks and straw wrappers; Bill Horka blowing the
radio fuse in my car by sticking the tongue of the seatbelt in between a
couple of exposed posts in the broken interior light; Melting a nylon
jacket while lighting things on fire in a culvert under a rail-trail
behind another Nick Cohs' house--not far from where he still lives;
Shooting glass bottles with a bb gun--glass bottles filled with paint
thinner, stuffed with a rag and lit on fire--and nearly starting a
forest fire; Heading out to the mall in the days before cell phones,
looking for Dave, thinking (correctly, as it turns out) that I would be
able to spot him because of the really loud shirt.

I wouldn't ever want to go back, but I sure get a kick out of thinking
about that stuff now. Too many memories to write about.